Thursday, August 14, 2008

Spotting label free protein microarrays

Christopher Lausted, Zhiyuan Hu, and Leroy Hood (Founder and President) from the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle used Stealth 7 Micro Spotting Pins to manufacture microarrays for a new high-throughput method for the quantitative analysis of serum proteins using surface plasmon resonance imaging. They report that microarray fabrication was easy with hundreds of microarrays printed with only a 10-microliter volume of antibody, with many samples analyzed by each array.

Highlights of the article include:

Detected and quantified specific proteins in complex biological mixtures without the use of labels.

Showed relative and absolute quantitation of proteins in serum.

Proved they could regenerate and reuse the same microarray 12 times “inter-array variability can be eliminated and more experimental replicates can be conducted”

Showed how antibody microarrays are a great complement to transcription arrays...they detected 39 protein changes, 26 of which correspond to genes previously observed to show differential mRNA regulation.

It's a great read for anyone doing or thinking about doing antibody microarrays with or without labels.